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Dreamweaver 2: The Return
(part 2)

By David Fiedler

Putting it through its paces...

I decided to test Dreamweaver 2 by trying out the features that the Macromedia folks told us were new and hot, so here's our original description of each one (from the news story), and how well it worked:

What we found: a winner! First, I got a screen capture of this article while it was open in a browser and saved it to a GIF file. After opening the article in Dreamweaver, I read the GIF into Dreamweaver using View/Tracing Image/Load. You then get a live slider control that allows you to adjust the level of transparency, so the Tracing Image doesn't unduly overwhelm the document you're editing (in WYSIWYG mode) in the foreground. Then you can move the image around, with pixel-level control, until it matches important graphic elements in your live document. After that, just make sure the document doesn't move those elements away while you're editing, and you'll know you're doing the right thing, graphically. The only downside: changing the transparency of the Tracing Image also changes its color, though that's a palette issue beyond Dreamweaver's control.

Claim: Layered Design: works with 3.0 browsers (using tables). You can specify the exact precision of the WYSIWYG-to-code translation, as well as the table size, so you'll get clean code, rather than tables filled with 1-pixel images.

What we found: it's quite easy to convert tables to layers for design purposes, move the layers around on the page, then convert them back to tables for 3.0 browsers. The code may be clean relative to some competing products, but most serious HTML coders will take one look and throw up their hands. The ability to specify precision, and prevent layer overlaps, though, is a very good thing.

Claim: Import to Spec: change the source formatting of imported HTML documents to match your "house style"

What we found: works great, couldn't be better, very clean, etc.

Claim: Live Media Playback and Server-Side Content Preview: directly from Dreamweaver...you don't have to keep flipping to your browser.

What we found: well. You can indeed see things like Shockwave and Flash from Dreamweaver. However, I was unable to get them to play without entering the Properties inspector and pressing the green "play" button. If I then previewed the page in an external browser, that would turn off play mode in Dreamweaver so I'd have to turn it on again. Considering these are their own products, I expected a bit better integration.

Server-Side files are included nicely, thanks to Dreamweaver's far better knowledge of where files exist, but don't expect things like LAST_MODIFIED to work; this is for included files only.

While we're on the "don't have to keep flipping to your flipping browser" topic, I'd like to point out that Dreamweaver 2 accurately displayed everything I threw at it in WYSIWYG mode, even tough table-hell pages like WebDeveloper.com's front page. You can edit the page in WYSIWYG mode, too: it's not just "preview-only" like HomeSite's browse view.

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